Thursday, October 16, 2008

Gary V

I had the chance to spend some tome today with that New Media force of nature — Gary Vaynerchuk. For those, who haven’t seen him, Gary is a dynamic and passionate speaker. Witness, for example, his keynote performance at the recent MyWeb 2.0 conference (note: contains some strong language). But there's a key difference between Gary and a number of prominent business speakers — not only can he talk the talk, he has also launched and grown successful businesses and recently published a commendable no nonsense book on enjoying wine.

How does he do it? More important, what can we as marketers do — not to be clones of Gary — to grow our own brands and products?

As he tells it, he grows community. He uses tools such as blogs, Tweeter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube and SEO/SEM. It’s not the tools per se, but how he uses them. He is online to listen, learn, contribute. This is not just feel good marketing. It’s ROI driven and embraces measurable media such as Google AdWords over conventional pay and pray media buys.

How does this busy entrepreneur spend his time? "I read and respond to blog comments, hang out on social network groups where my customers go, and (at least try to) answer all of my email."

How have you connected with your customers today?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nice assessment of how Gary makes it work. I've been hooked on his twitter/blog ever since he spoke to our class... part of me thinks his success can be largely attributed to his personality.

He gave me a few pointers on how to keep building traffic on my blog which was great. It got me thinking about how I can get people to return to my blog after they are first introduced to it. I decided on making a t-shirt with my blog title on it and giving out a free shirt every week to the person who leaves my favorite comment. I figure, if I do this for a month or so it will give people an incentive to come back to the blog and leave comments. Hopefully, they'll get hooked and continue to read the blog after I stop giving out t-shirts!

-Philipp